The Red Room - August Strindberg (best summer reads TXT) 📗

“Yes! How well you know me!”

“I once knew a young man⁠—I know him no longer, he is so changed! He was fifteen years old when he left the penitentiary which every community keeps for the children who commit the outrageous crime of being born, and where the innocent little ones are made to atone for their parents’ fall from grace⁠—for what should otherwise become of society? Please remind me to keep to the subject! On leaving it he went for five years to Upsala and read a terrible number of books; his brain was divided into six pigeonholes in which six kinds of information, dates, names, a whole warehouseful of ready-made opinions, conclusions, theories, ideas and nonsense of every description, were stored like a general cargo. This might have been allowed to pass, for there’s plenty of room in a brain. But he was also supposed to accept foreign thoughts, rotten, old thoughts, which others had chewed for a lifetime, and which they now vomited. It filled him with nausea and⁠—he was twenty years old⁠—he went on the stage. Look at my watch! Look at the second-hand; it makes sixty little steps before a minute has passed; sixty times sixty before it is an hour; twenty-four times the number and it is a day; three hundred and sixty-five times and it is only a year. Now imagine ten years! Did you ever wait for a friend outside his house? The first quarter of an hour passes like a flash! The second quarter⁠—oh! one doesn’t mind waiting for a person one’s fond of; the third quarter: he’s not coming; the fourth: hope and fear; the fifth: one goes away but hurries back; the sixth: Damn it all! I’ve wasted my time for nothing! the seventh: having waited so long, I might just as well wait a little longer; the eighth: raging and cursing; the ninth: One goes home, lies down on one’s sofa and feels as calm as if one were walking arm in arm with death. He waited for ten years! Ten years! Isn’t my hair standing on end when I say ten years? Look at it! Ten years had passed before he was allowed to play a part. When he did, he had a tremendous success⁠—at once. But his ten wasted years had brought him to the verge of insanity; he was mad that it hadn’t happened ten years before. And he was amazed to find that happiness when at last he held it within his grasp didn’t make him happy! And so he was unhappy.”

“But don’t you think he required the ten years for the study of his art?”

“How could he study it when he was never allowed to play? He was a laughingstock, the scum of the playbill; the management said he was no good; and whenever he tried to find an engagement at another theatre, he was told that he had no repertoire.”

“But why couldn’t he be happy when his luck had turned?”

“Do you think an immortal soul is content with happiness? But why speak about it? Your resolution is irrevocable. My advice is superfluous. There is but one teacher: experience, and experience is as capricious, or as calculating, as a schoolmaster; some of the pupils are always praised; others are always beaten. You are born to be praised; don’t think I’m saying this because you belong to a good family; I’m sufficiently enlightened not to make that fact responsible for good or evil; in this case it is a particularly negligible quantity, for on the stage a man stands or falls by his own merit. I hope you’ll have an early success so that you won’t be enlightened too soon; I believe you deserve it.”

“But have you no respect for your art, the greatest and most sublime of all arts?”

“It’s overrated like everything about which men write books. It’s full of danger and can do much harm! A beautifully told lie can impress like a truth! It’s like a mass meeting where the uncultured majority turns the scale. The more superficial the better⁠—the worse, the better! I don’t mean to say that it is superfluous.”

“That can’t be your opinion!”

“That is my opinion, but all the same, I may be mistaken.”

“But have you really no respect for your art?”

“For mine? Why should I have more respect for my art than for anybody else’s?”

“And yet you’ve played the greatest parts! You’ve played Shakespeare! You’ve played Hamlet! Have you never been touched in your inmost soul when speaking that tremendous monologue: ‘To be or not to be.⁠ ⁠…’ ”

“What do you mean by tremendous?”

“Full of profound thought.”

“Do explain yourself! Is it so full of profound thought to say: Shall I take my life or not? I should do so if I knew what comes hereafter, and everybody else would do the same thing; but as we don’t know, we don’t take our lives. Is that so very profound?”

“Not if expressed in those words.”

“There you are! You’ve surely contemplated suicide at one time or another? Haven’t you?”

“Yes; I suppose most people have.”

“And why didn’t you do it? Because, like Hamlet, you hadn’t the courage, not knowing what comes after. Were you very profound then?”

“Of course I wasn’t!”

“Therefore it’s nothing but a banality! Or, expressed in one word it is⁠—what is it, Gustav?”

“Stale!” came a voice from the clock, a voice which seemed to have waited for its cue.

“It’s stale! But, supposing the poet had given us an acceptable supposition of a future life, that would have been something new.”

“Is everything new excellent?” asked Rehnhjelm. Under the pressure of all the new ideas to which he had been listening, his courage was fast ebbing away.

“New ideas have one great merit⁠—they are new! Try to think your own thoughts and you will always find them new! Will you believe me when I say that I knew what you wanted before you walked in at that door? And that I know what you are going to say next, seeing that